Swiss bank UBS has issued a worldwide travel ban for wealth management client advisers, a spokeswoman said, after coming under scrutiny in a US tax fraud investigation.
“Last week, we issued a general travel ban for all staff with client contact in international wealth management,” the spokeswoman said.
“UBS is currently conducting a review of its policy and compliance framework for its international wealth management offering,” she said, adding that the ban would be in place until the review is finalized.
UBS is the world’s largest wealth management company in terms of assets. Last year, US authorities briefly detained a senior UBS employee as part of a probe into whether the bank helped US clients evade tax through Swiss bank accounts.
After the probe was launched, UBS said it would discontinue offshore banking and securities services to US residents and stopped client advisers based in Switzerland from travelling to the US to meet clients.
The Swiss newspaper Sonntags Blick reported on Sunday that more than 1,000 employees would be affected by the ban now in place.
“This is an immediate step to reduce compliance risk. We are conducting the review because of the complex regulatory environment of UBS international wealth management,” the spokeswoman said.
Last week, the Financial Times (FT) reported that Swiss private banks were banning their top executives from traveling abroad.
The FT quoted an unnamed head of a leading private bank in Geneva as saying steps by countries like the US and Germany to fight tax evasion meant banks felt they had to limit travel to protect employees.
It cited four unnamed sources in the Geneva private banking industry as saying some banks were introducing total travel bans for staff, even for neighboring European countries.
Following an agreement at last week’s G20 summit to crack down on tax havens, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development placed Switzerland on a “gray list” of countries that have agreed to improve transparency standards but have not yet signed the necessary international accords.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
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PRESSURE EXPECTED: The appreciation of the NT dollar reflected expectations that Washington would press Taiwan to boost its currency against the US dollar, dealers said Taiwan’s export-oriented semiconductor and auto part manufacturers are expecting their margins to be affected by large foreign exchange losses as the New Taiwan dollar continued to appreciate sharply against the US dollar yesterday. Among major semiconductor manufacturers, ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光), the world’s largest integrated circuit (IC) packaging and testing services provider, said that whenever the NT dollar rises NT$1 against the greenback, its gross margin is cut by about 1.5 percent. The NT dollar traded as strong as NT$29.59 per US dollar before trimming gains to close NT$0.919, or 2.96 percent, higher at NT$30.145 yesterday in Taipei trading
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